As a writer, I wrote hundreds of articles for more than a dozen different publications.

I started the year off reporting for the Austin Chronicle, where I wrote 20 news articles, mostly focusing on the city’s battle with Uber and Lyft.

After graduating, I interned over the summer with the Dallas Morning News‘ Editorial Board, where I wrote more than 40 opinion columns and editorials—many of which were also published around the country, from the Charlotte Observer to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald to the Sun Sentinelin Florida to the Albany Times Union to the Virgin Islands Daily News and a handful of other publications in between. Following the Dallas Ambush, I was interviewed on Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster, and SPIN 1038, a radio station in Dublin, Ireland. In August, I won the DMN‘s in-house writing award for Commentary and Criticism between April and June. My three winning entries (on sexual assault, Trump, and homophobia) made me the only intern to win an award.

After wrapping up my internship with the DMN, I started working as a news writer for Complex, where I wrote and aggregated 338 articles on just about anything and everything between September 1 and December 29, which was my last day with them.

Early in the year, I interviewed Dallas’ own So So Topic (aka -topic) about his project, My Favorite Sweaters. This article was only one of a handful of articles I wrote in 2016 about the local rapper.

Having previously extensively reported on campus carry, I argued that campus carry has had and will have negative consequences for the University of Texas at Austin, but that it won’t be all that dangerous.

Regardless of your opinion on campus carry, you can’t deny that #CocksNotGlocks brought international attention to the issue—and the reaction to the Cocks Not Glocks protest revealed exactly why it was so necessary.

Even after my internship, I still occasionally contribute to the Dallas Morning News, both as a columnist and on behalf of the Editorial Board. This is a topic that’s especially important to me, so I was glad to write about it on behalf of my hometown paper.

Over the year, I’ve continued contributing to the Austin Chronicle, covering news and even writing two cover stories for them this year (my two longest articles ever). I wrote more articles for The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Observer this year, but I also wrote for The Chicago Tribune and The Houston Chronicle, two of the biggest papers in the country, for the first time this year. At the 2015 Central Texas Colloquium on Religion in February, I presented an academic paper “MCs & Marx: Examining Rap from a Historical Materialist Perspective,” which I will expand into my honors thesis.

After hearing of a young socialists club at my high school, I was reminded of my own history of high school activism, and decided to write in support of those of us who fall outside of the political mainstream.

While lots of people are now familiar with UT Student Government President Xavier Rotnofsky and Vice President Rohit Mandalapu, they first made national news when they campaigned to take over the student government. I wrote about RotMan for the first time following their electoral victory, though at the time, I wasn’t expecting to write so much more about the duo over the year.

After reporting on incidents of racism in the UT campus community, I talked with Dr. Richard Reddick, a UT alum and professor, and looked into some of the reasons why the Greek community can often seem hostile toward racial minorities.

After reporting in my cover story about the long legacy of racism at UT, I wrote an opinion column in my hometown paper urging UT President Greg Fenves to remove the Jefferson Davis statue from our campus.

Following my column advocating the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue from campus and after Dylann Roof murdered nine people in a historic black church, I wanted to make clear that there’s nothing wrong with ‘Southern Pride,’ but that there’s a whole lot wrong with the South’s history of racism, especially during the Confederacy.

After first advocating the removal of UT’s Jefferson Davis statue back in 2013 and after all the time I had spent covering the controversy and history of the statues, it was a special moment for me to be there live to cover the removal of the statue.

Originally a longer research paper for my “Constitutional Design” class at UT, I wrote about some of the Electoral College’s flaws, particularly its role in enabling and arguably encouraging racial inequality for the newly-created Scalawag Magazine, which covers the culture of the American South.

Unfortunately, my “pointless screed,” as one unhappy commenter described it, might be behind a paywall for some. Still, it was an honor to have my thoughts about campus carry published in one of the largest papers in the country.

I’ve known how to write for a very, very long time. But knowing how to write doesn’t make you a writer, in the same way that knowing how to shoot a basketball doesn’t make you an athlete (although it took me quite a while to realize that).

I’m a teenager. I say a lot of things without thinking; I say a lot of things I shouldn’t. Realizing this, my mom used to have a “cursing jar,” in which I would have to put a dollar every time I cuss. As you can imagine, my language was cleaned up in no time. The scenario got me thinking: what’s wrong with profanity? What makes some words worse than others?